Amie Shao

LEED AP

Principal and Senior Director

Boston, MA, USA

Amie Shao is a Principal at MASS, where she leads the Maternal & Newborn Health Design Lab. Her work is aimed at championing the design of safe and culturally reverent childbirth spaces and fostering awareness around how spaces shape healing, equity and dignity. 

Blending human-centered practices with evidence-based research, she has designed childbirth facilities in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Kenya; evaluated the impact of maternity waiting homes in Malawi; collaborated with Ariadne Labs to investigate how birth environments influence cesarean rates; and coordinated the development of Liberia’s National Health Infrastructure Standards.

Amie is currently partnering with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement on Delivering More, a human-centered design toolkit for co-creating safe and respectful birth spaces in low- and middle-income countries. She is also leading design efforts for the Neighborhood Birth Center in Boston, advancing reproductive and racial justice through community-based, culturally grounded midwifery care.

Amie has lived in many of MASS’s locations including Port-au-Prince, Haiti; Kigali, Rwanda; and Boston, MA. Prior to joining MASS, she worked for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Beijing, WORK Architecture Company in New York City, and EnSitu, S.A. in Panama. Amie received her Master of Architecture and a Certificate in Urban Policy & Planning from Princeton University.